Web 2.0

I’ve been interested in Twitter for a while now – it is probably one of the flagship web 2.0 innovations, (and its Ruby on Rails). But I’ve had a problem with it; I can’t answer the question “what’s in it for me“. What is the point of Twitter? I signed up a while ago and invited a few friends, but the responses were generally along the lines of “what’s wrong with FaceBook status” (one tweet read, “[name] doesnt understand how this is any different from his IM or facebook status). This is a good question. Instant messenger can change the way an enterprise communicates – what’s wrong with IM? Why not put your status alongside your IM ID? Staying with the enterprise theme, you can’t walk into an investment bank without seeing someone scanning their blackberry. Why would an enterprise need Twitter when eyes are glued to the ‘berry?JP Rangaswami has been blogging a series of articles on Twitter – I commented on one post asking these sorts of questions. In a follow up blog, he has answered my questions. I’m beginning to see the point of Twitter – more to the point, when I’m talking to clients about enterprise 2.0, I’ve got a more compelling Twitter story to tell. So (borrowing from JP), why Twitter?

1. Publish – subscribe. Unlike email where an author publishes a note to a group of people she feels will be interested in it, with Twitter people can choose whether to subscribe to what the author writes. If they like what they read they can continue to consume the ‘tweets’. But how is this different to subscribing to a newsgroup? With a newsgroup you can only select to subscribe to the topic, not the author. Unless you use some clever filtering, you can’t choose whose words you read. And filtering takes time and is rarely straight forward; bringing on the second point for Twitter…

2. It is easy.

3. It is multi-device. Not only do I choose who I receive tweets from, I choose how I will receive them – via SMS, email, rss etc.

4. It is succint – 140 characters is not a lot of words to write with

Anyway, an enterprise example…

Today:

Jack Fiction knows something – he’s learned a great insight about a potential client. He sends a mail to people he thinks might be interested in this insight. He includes a copy to the Business Development email interest group that was set up by IS
– It is a closed circle. People not on the cc list will never learn of the insight.
– It doesn’t mean anything to them at that time. They delete the mail. It has no history.
– Many interested people are not on the IS email list
– People who are no longer interested still get sent mails to the group.

Twitter:

Jack knows something – he’s learned a great insight about a potential client. He tweets about it.

– It is public
– It has history

Jack doesn’t need to think who will be interested in what he writes; people who value what he does subscribe to his Twitter. They can see an archive of his previous tweets on his Twitter space. If they no longer want to listen to what Jack says they unsubscribe – the UI is elegant and simple.

This model assumes thats people interested in the insight know Jack in the first place, but that is generally the way that social interactions work. Let people communicate between themselves – it is far easier to choose who you want to listen to, to who you want to talk to. And in doing this it is far easier to cut out the noise.

The web is changing. The words of the Cluetrain Manifesto are being realised – “Markets are Conversations”, driven by this thing called “Web 2.0” a mish-mash of ideas around digital strategy, experience and technology. For the mainstream the web is moving away from being solely a provider of content with primarily a “push” experience with crude journeys to purchase and fulfilment to being the platform. It is becoming an increasingly interactive experience; web sites are becoming applications, social in their nature.

There are the obvious candidates; Google docs and spreadsheets, these are web applications that challenge their desktop brethren. What they offer in addition is the ability to collaborate on documents – real time. Look at Kayak and the experience it offers for selecting flights. The experience is more like an application, entering and manipulating data in the same place (rather than the old web linear experience: enter data -> hit enter key -> wait -> “Result: Sorry, nothing suitable matches your criteria” -> start again). Social networking sites are also more akin to applications than websites – Facebook even calls its widgets “applications”. Wesabe is a social Microsoft money – it strives to replace an application.

Where does that leave you if you want to harness the new interactive potential and more fulfilling customer experience of ‘web as platform’, ‘your site an application’? In the old world (old world in this space being a couple of years ago), you would probably have engaged a technology firm to build / configure your content management system with a more creative “new media” firm building the on-line brand giving you the look and feel. Any interactive components (such as calculators, quotation engines) would probably be built and owned by IT, with minimal input from the creative agency. Take a look at many large institutional websites and you will see evidence of this. The static content managed brochureware side of the site will be polished; it will have been built by interface developers with experience of building excellent front ends. Yet the parts that were built by technology, by Java developers (for example) who are excellent in back end stuff but not so experienced in the front end stuff will usually be sloppy in their execution. (Sloppy to a pedantic UI guy’s eye – not to the customer!)

So, if the web is a platform and your site is to be an application, who do you turn to? I’d suggest take care. If you are going to engage a new media agency make sure they have the experience and can demonstrate delivery on time and on budget. Indeed, are they really the right people for the job – interestingly, the most successful new propositions on the web (YouTube, Facebook, MySpace etc) go easy on the creative design (if at all) focussing upon the customer interaction. Alternatively you could choose an organisation whose pedigree in application design and build (ahem, like ThoughtWorks for example) and insert some sort of measure of aesthetic quality as a non-functional requirement. Want an example of this in practice? Take a look at the new ThoughtWorks Studios product Mingle. To the uninitiated it is a website – hey! it is in a browser. But this is nothing short of an application. A rather good one at that. Has your New Media Agency built anything like that?

We like to classify things, put them in homes. Information Architects design controlled vocabularies and taxonomies; ultimately labeling where things should go. Things may live in more than one place; we may use a faceted classification, but essentially that is a roadmap to the same unique, indivisible place. On the web this typically means an unintelligible URL with lots of random characters rather than something that is human readable. And that is just not nice. So you want a Robbie Williams CD (not that I’m sure why you’d want such a thing) – your journey may take you down any route:

Whatever the route, chances are they’ll take you to the same page; “robbiewilliams.htm” with a unique URL (more likely than not it will be a dogs dinner of characters and symbols thrown up by the content management system).

The drawback of each journey terminating at the same place is that it lacks context. For example, a music store might have a campaign around specific artists. They may choose a different flavour to the branding in the campaign, a different look and feel. The “Brits” pages are different to the “Dance pop” pages. But as soon as the user is directed to a specific record they will served up the standard artist page. Any context of the journey in a breadcrumb will be lost (or in Amazon repeated to show where the product “lives” according to the different classification hierarchies).

Yet what if the product’s classification was truly faceted, was not indivisible, but lived wherever it was sought? Should the URL of “Robbie Williams” not be how the user has found it, the URL becoming the breadcrumb?

The page may be (almost) the same, served up (mashed /meshed up) with the context in which it was sought. Related links would be specific to the URL rather than generic (other Brits awards winner in the Brits context, other male vocalists in that context). Yes, there maybe multiple versions of the same page on the site, but from a findability perspective this is little different to a conventional faceted classification system.

OK, this is all well and good, but doesn’t it hinder search engine optimisation? Well no, Google handles duplicate content quite nicely thank you very much. So bring on the tidy URLs and content living nowhere and everywhere.

Social networking is all the rage at the moment. I’m attending meetings where clients are buzzing about creating a community… and I find myself challenging their enthusiasm. I return to a simple question: “So what”. Put yourself in the shoes of your customers and ask “What’s in it for me?” Leisa says this succinctly:

What is it about a community that you are looking to build? Indeed is it really a community that you want per se, or is it more about building affiliation around your products? Where is the justification for the investment? Is the business case geared more towards product development; about letting your customers comment on your products, providing feedback that you can use to improve, enhance and develop new products and features – a forum for listening to your customers conversations?

Maybe you think there is something in your proposition and it demands a social network. How are you going to make it a destination of choice, to cut through the noise of every other social networking site (how long before we see friendship fatigue setting in?) Facebook has opened up its APIs to the outside world – Could you leverage Facebook, developing applications that will sit on their platform rather than trying to build a network from scratch?

Here’s a presentation I recently put together on digital strategy and what Web 2.0 could mean to a fictional jewelery company. It rapidly introduces some of the key concepts then presents a customer journey through a “what if” scenario. Apologies for the poor audio!

Following a recent Economist article, JP Rangaswami blogged about “can versus should“. His theme was around DRM and identity; just because the government can monitor your digital behaviour does not mean that they should. I like this, but think it can be extended to much of the IT domain.

Web 2.0 introduces many new styles of interaction, drag and drop, take over the right-hand mouse button… just because we can do these things doesn’t necessarily mean that we should. What will the impact be? Hide calls to action behind the mouse button on your site and your site alone, how does the user know to find them there? When building a “deluxe web” site at the forefront of mind should be how will people actually interact with the proposition. Just because we can do some technically cool stuff that would give us a buzz and gain nods of appreciation from our technical colleagues, doesn’t mean that we should. A customer who has come to the proposition probably requires clarity and an ability to accomplish their goals. They care very little for the stuff we can do.

And then there is mobile. Just because we can deliver the ability to enable customers to watch TV on their phones, doesn’t mean that we should. Too often new propositions are driven by IT ability rather than consumer demand. WAP was a great example of this; IT consultants getting excited about delivering content on mobile phones using WAP, completely overlooking what a shocking experience it was and simultaneously missing what consumers actually wanted to do – text message.

Marc McNeill

For more than a decade Marc has been a passionate advocate of placing the customer at the heart of business, working with clients in finance, retail, government and entertainment sectors, helping them craft compelling cross channel customer experiences. Marc champions lean and agile approaches for making customer driven innovation happen. He co-authored the book Agile Experience Design. As a consultant with ThoughtWorks he brought design thinking and creativity to clients, engaging across their organisations with a focus on delivery as well as ideas. Today he is Customer Experience Director at Auto Trader. He has been known to dance and is rather partial to mangos.